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An industrial developer is working to line up support from the Atlanta City Council to build a major reservoir on city-owned property in North Georgia.

Jerry Daws, president of Republic Resources Inc. of Atlanta, has been pitching council members this summer on a plan to convert 2,000 acres of the 10,000-acre Dawson Forest tract into a reservoir that could serve as an alternative to Lake Lanier.

Under the proposal, the other 8,000 acres would be set aside as protected wilderness.

“This is a unique opportunity to take an incredibly pristine environment, create a tremendously needed water source and preserve it,” Daws told Atlanta Business Chronicle.

Daws began meeting with council members weeks before a July 17 federal court decision threatened withdrawals from Lake Lanier. The reservoir serves about 3.5 million metro Atlanta water customers.

U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson ruled that water supply was not an authorized purpose for Lanier when the Chattahoochee River was dammed to build the reservoir.

The judge gave Georgia, Alabama and Florida three years to reach a solution to their 19-year legal dispute over water allocations from Lanier. If they fail, according to the order, water withdrawals from the federally managed reservoir would be rolled back to mid-1970s levels.

In the weeks since the decision, finding alternatives to Lanier has emerged as part of Gov. Sonny Perdue’s multi-pronged response, along with appealing the ruling, drafting legislation in Congress and stepping up water conservation.

“We’ve got to get less dependent on Lake Lanier’s storage capacity,” Harold Reheis, vice president of the lobbying firm Joe Tanner & Associates Inc. and former director of the state Environmental Protection Division, said Aug. 14 during a panel discussion on water sponsored by the Council for Quality Growth.

“[But] providing a lot of storage capacity in a hurry is a very difficult thing to do. In metro Atlanta, fewer and fewer sites are available.”

The Dawson Forest tract, several miles southwest of Dawsonville, has been in Atlanta’s hands since the city bought it in the early 1970s as a potential second airport site.

However, a 1990 study commissioned by the Atlanta Regional Commission determined that other exurban Atlanta locations would be more suitable for an airport. Also, pressure for a second airport diminished when Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport added a fifth runway in 2006.

Under Daws’ proposal, the city would sell the property to the Etowah Water & Sewer Authority, which serves Dawson County.

The utility then would work in a public-private partnership with a new corporate entity to be formed by Daws to build a $600 million to $650 million reservoir by damming Shoal Creek, a tributary of the Etowah River.

The project would yield 100 million gallons of water a day, the same amount of water five municipal utilities have been pulling from Lake Lanier this year. Some of the water would be piped south to serve Atlanta, Sandy Springs and possibly Johns Creek. The rest would serve customers in Dawson County and other counties in the region, including Forsyth, Cherokee and Pickens.

Environmental advocates said a commitment not to develop the property would be important in building support for the project.

Conservation groups have long called for preserving the site, one of the largest contiguous forested areas in North Georgia not owned by the state or federal governments. The property currently is overseen by the state Department of Natural Resources as a wildlife management area.

But Joe Cook, executive director of the Coosa River Basin Initiative, said he sees little sense in building a reservoir in the headwaters of the Etowah River as an alternative to Lake Lanier.

“The only thing you’re doing is shifting where the water is stored,” he said. “You’re not creating more water.”

Cook said tapping into a river system outside of metro Atlanta to serve thirsty Atlantans also would draw strong opposition from downstream communities that depend on the Etowah basin, including Cartersville and Rome.

“We’ve got to be very careful that ... in trying to solve the tri-state water war, we don’t create our own intra-state water war,” added Jill Johnson, program director for Georgia Conservation Voters.

“It’s politically sensitive. No elected official wants to be caught red-handed in a water grab.”

Besides the political hurdles, a host of legal obstacles also stand in the way of the project.

Since the reservoir would not be federally managed, it would not be subject to the authorization restrictions that resulted in the ruling on Lake Lanier.

However, it still would have to navigate cumbersome state and federal permitting requirements.

Also, because the Etowah is part of the Coosa River system that flows westward into Alabama, that state would have the same legal rights to intervene that have allowed Alabama to take Georgia to court over Lake Lanier.

City council members are well aware of the difficulties they would face steering such a project from concept to reality.

“It’s going to be a lot of jumping through hoops,” said Councilwoman Carla Smith, chairman of the council’s Utilities Committee.

But Councilman Howard Shook, who heads the Finance/Executive Committee, said the decision on Lake Lanier has created urgency to get something done on water.

“The court ruling might make this a little more worth looking into,” he said. “We’ve got to start checking around for ideas.”

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